Chinese characters found in caves in Ha Long Bay

VietNamNet Bridge – The walls and stalactites of famous caves in Ha Long Bay, a World Heritage Site in Vietnam, have been covered with Chinese characters.

The way to Dau Go Cave.

Dau Go cave is in the worst situation, with Chinese characters on the cliffs, on rocks and on the ceiling.

The management authorities of Ha Long Bay do not know the meaning of the script or when the scripts appeared.

Dau Go Cave (Wooden Stakes Cave) was found on the same island, about 6 kilometers from Bai Chay wharf, Ha Long City. This is the biggest and also most beautiful grotto in Ha Long Bay. In the system of caves in Ha Long Bay, Dau Go is one of the most visited sites. This case was previously praised by the French as “the Cave of Wonders”.

According to scientists, Dau Go Cave was formed in the Pleistocene era around 2 million years ago. The cave is 27 meters above sea level. The entrance is 12 meters wide and 17 meters high. Inside the cave is a huge space of 5.000 square meters. The height of the dome is 25 meters.

The cave is a magnificent world of stalactites and stalagmites, the result of the karst process over a long period. They are of various sizes and shapes, and seem like lively statues and reliefs about nature and people on Ha Long Bay.

 

Chinese characters in Dau Go Cave.

However, this relic site is being smeared by Chinese scripts written with paint.

“There are many characters in very hard-to-reach positions, as on the cave ceiling, and I don’t understand how could they write them,” an employee of the Ha Long Bay Management Authorities said.

He said they had consulted experts, but they could only surmise who had written them.

According to a specialist in cultural studies, the Chinese characters in Dau Go Cave might have been written by Chinese workers in 1998, when they installed lighting systems in some caves in Ha Long Bay.

“Many words were written in extremely difficult positions, such as the towering roof caves or vertical cave walls. Perhaps when they installed lighting devices on these locations, they wrote the characters. No one is able to climb to these positions without support equipment,” the expert said.

However, Mr. Wu Hung – former Head of the Ha Long Bay Management Authorities in 2002-2011 – said the Chinese characters in Dau Go Cave were seen before 1998.

“I do not know exactly when these words appeared but these characters had been there a long time ago before I assumed the leadership of the Ha Long Bay Management Authorities in 2002,” Hung said.

The explanation that makes sense is those letters were written by tourists visiting Ha Long Bay before 1994 – the time Ha Long Bay was recognized as a World Heritage site.

Before that date, fishing boats freely brought tourists to visit the bay. Tourists could do whatever they liked because the bay was not managed by anyone. The characters in the high positions might have been written by tourists who were mountain climbers.

According to the staff of the bay management authority, the characters are also engraved in stone, written in ink or paint, but all of them have been difficult to erase.

Ms. Pham Thuy Duong, head of the Ha Long Bay Management Authorities, said that in 2013 the agency sought help from experts of the Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources, but they could do nothing because many characters were engraved very deeply into stone, and were then painted.

“We and experts have researched and tested a number of solutions, including the use of chemicals to erase the letters, but we failed. We do not know what substance they used to write on stone. Recently, we asked for assistance from an expert from New Zealand. He suggested some methods and we are testing them on a small scale, but they seem to be inefficient,” Duong said.

Some proposed to take aggressive measures, such as chiseling and drilling to delete the characters, but these could negatively affect the cave walls.

A tourist said he had taken photos of some Chinese letters and asked experts to translate.

Experts said most of the words were about love or confirmation of the writers’ presence in Ha Long or praise of the beauty of the bay and the cave.

The characters are not ancient scripts, so these letters are unacceptable in a place like Ha Long Bay.

T. Van

Chinese characters found in caves in Ha Long Bay

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